Once upon a time I read fairy tales. Once upon a time I read a slightly subversive Victorian lady fairy tale to a virtual audience of about ten. We were all in little digital Zoom boxes, but outside of the boxes we were inside of homes.
I pitched something to Lit Hub and they took it. A dream. But bittersweet. Because it’s for Eavan Boland. It’s about motherhood, and middle age, and passion and confusion and regret. So it’s also for all mothers who have art stirring, and waiting, inside them. Go be you. I know it feels hard. But do…
It’s been a wild autumn. I was picking up speed here, posting about Barbuda and Puerto Rico, and a poem in response to Las Vegas, and then…silence. The reason for my silence was fire. I live in Santa Rosa, which was the city hardest hit by the Northern California fires in October. I was rendered…
There is so much to say about 2016, and so much work to be done now, in our minds, hearts, surroundings. I am beginning, however, with books. When my parents were here over Christmas, my father drove down our mountain to get his beloved Sunday New York Times. Of course, I devoured as much…
This weekend a good friend and I spent the day together at the coast. As we walked along the marshy trail to the beach, the air was warm and breezy, the sky shifting from silver-cast to blue and back again, the earth dark and pleasingly mucky, and the herbs and grasses and native flowers all…
The first day of this month was the 54th anniversary of the first day of lunch-counter sit-ins in the segregated South. At the very tail end of January, in the course of my volunteer book-shelving at one of the Sonoma County libraries, I came across a children’s picture book called Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood…